On December 1, 2008, I became an American, eleven years and five months after I started living here. It was a bright, cold morning, and my son dropped me off at the Immigration and Naturalization office in Fairfax, Virginia, and wished me luck. The office was in a glass-and-metal building, in a parking lot close to the highway. In its total lack of character or beauty, it seemed invulnerable and imposing. Inside, I sat in a huge waiting room and frantically reviewed my citizenship questions, even though I knew them by heart.
The interview turned out to be much more pleasant than I had feared. I was asked only two civics questions, and was told to write a simple English sentence. My interviewer was a friendly young African-American woman who asked me about my job. When I told her I was a writer, she wanted to know what kind of books I wrote. I offered to send her one, and was reminded that as a government worker she could not accept gifts. She told me that, if I waited until two o’clock, I could take the oath and become naturalized the same day.
There was nowhere to wait but a small diner nearby. I bought a paper, ordered coffee and eggs, and sat at a table by the window. I opened my notebook to jot down my thoughts, but it all seemed too confusing. How did it start, this relationship with America? When I was a young girl, in Tehran, my English tutor told me the story of the Wizard of Oz. It was the first time I had heard of America, of Kansas, and of cyclones. Later, I came to hear of a river called Mississippi: “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was the book that I returned to most often, during the years I taught English in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Throughout the book, Huck and Jim turn the decent, civilized world on its head. They are subversives, but compassionate ones, trusting their own instincts and experiences. The more I read of American books, the more I encountered other characters who seemed to do something similar—Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie. It was this aspect of America—its vagrant nature—that I connected to. America somehow encourages this vagabond self, and that is surely why so many people who migrate feel at home here: they can be outsiders yet still belong. Years before I became an American, I had already made my home in the imaginary America.
After lunch, I joined a long queue of people waiting to get naturalization packages, which included a booklet containing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and a small American flag on a gold-colored plastic flagpole. We filed into a room and sat down. The national anthem played in the background, and a television projected images of the flag and of American landscapes. My seat was No. 30; on my left was No. 29 and on my right No. 31. No. 31 interested me. Unlike me and the man to my left, he seemed to have taken some trouble with his appearance, and wore a pink shirt and a salmon-colored tie. He had deep-brown eyes and an engaging smile. At one point, I overheard him speaking in Arabic. He must have been in his mid-thirties. He fidgeted, looking in my direction, with the movements of a man who is dying to talk. I smiled at him encouragingly and he smiled back, pointing to the small flag in my hand. He waved his, and said, “For the past ten years, I have kept an American flag in my apartment. I take it out, dust it, and put it back again.” He paused and then said, “And now this!” The next time he took his flag out, he would do so as an American citizen. He went on to describe what awaited us: first, there would be the President’s message of welcome, some speeches about citizenship, then each of us would be called. “Remember to keep your flag in your hand,” he told me. “And smile, because someone will take our pictures.” But no one did.
He was like an ecstatic bridegroom just before his wedding, relating to a perfect stranger his good fortune, the years he had hidden the picture of his beloved, taking it out every once in a while to gaze—and now this! I listened to him but did not say much. Could I have said that I became a citizenbecause of Huck Finn and Jim, because of Dorothy and Oz? Nothing I could have said would have matched his joy, his complete immersion in the moment.
Afterward, we all stepped out into the cold, brilliant day. I called my husband to say that I was now the first American in the family. As I walked down the street, a car stopped, and my Arab friend rolled the window down to ask me if I wanted a ride. I thanked him and declined; a bit nostalgic, I watched the car move on and disappear. It occurred to me that I did not know his name, and that I had not asked him where he was from. ♦